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Between Jan. 26 and Feb. 8 of next year, the 3,425 members of the University of B.C. faculty association will be called on to vote in a referendum calling for the university’s complete divestment of all its holdings in fossil fuel assets.

If successful — and the referendum requires a simple majority of at least 20 per cent of the eligible voters — the divestment recommendation will then go to the UBC board of governors.

If the board votes in favour of the recommendation, UBC will be the first Canadian university to divest its fossil fuel assets, organizers said, and it would rank as the most comprehensive such divestment in the academic world.

The investments at stake are considerable. UBC’s endowment fund is worth $1.2 billion, and direct investment in fossil fuel companies is estimated at $100 million. These investment include shares in Suncor, the major player in the Alberta tarsands.

The faculty campaign to divest grew out of an earlier campaign in 2013, when students gathered enough signatures to put a divestment referendum on the Alma Mater Society election ballots. In that election, students voted 77 per cent in favour of divestment.

In response to the students’ referendum, UBC adopted a new Responsible Investment Policy for the endowment fund in April. It committed the university to incorporate environmental, social and governance considerations in its investment choices, and established procedures for proposals to divest from particular sectors. These included demonstrated support from at least two of the school’s core constituencies — students, staff, faculty or alumni.

It was an open letter signed by 215 faculty members calling for divestment that convinced the faculty association to hold next year’s referendum. One of the main organizers behind the open letter was professor George Hoberg, with UBC’s faculty of forest resource management. Hoberg specializes in energy policy and sustainability.

“It is a tall ask,” Hoberg said, “but it’s very similar to the way the apartheid campaign began in getting major institutions to divest (of their South African assets) and in influencing U.S. foreign policy against the South African regime. That’s kind of the model the fossil fuel divestment movement is inspired by.”

It was his children, Hoberg said, who compelled him to become involved.

Hoberg’s daughter, Sophie, an economics major at Stanford, was active in the successful campaign that saw Stanford divest all of its coal holdings, and his son, Sam, an engineering student at the University of Toronto, is active in the fossil fuel divestment campaign there.

“I was an academic that studied energy and environmental policy,” Hoberg said, “and in 2011, I walked across that line into advocacy as well. I became concerned about the climate crisis, and having children who were active in climate campaigns, and standing up in front of students on a daily basis talking about the climate crisis, it became hard not to take some of the responsibility to get something done.”

“If our generation doesn’t solve this problem,” Holberg said, “it will be too late for the next generation most affected by the problem that will be in power to do so.”

Other faculty members — including signatories of the open letter in the economics, business and climate science departments — have gone through the same transformation in recent years, he said. He said the group would also be bringing a motion to the faculty association’s annual general meeting in April to divest its pension fund of fossil fuel assets.

“Our current fossil fuel-dominated economic system,” Hoberg said, “is patently unsustainable. The science on that is unquestionable. We need a rapid and dramatic transition to a clean energy system. That is not going to be easy, especially in the short term. But the current economic models that we have show that transition is both feasible and economically affordable, and we need to get on it now, not only because it makes economic sense but because it’s our moral obligation.”

Divestment would not hurt the university’s bottom line, Hoberg said. In a position paper outlining the divestment group’s arguments, several studies were cited that showed divested portfolios performed as well as, and sometimes better than, those with fossil fuel assets.

“The most comprehensive analysis to date is an August 2014 report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This study performed so-called ‘back tests’ where they separate fossil fuel stocks out from a well-known financial index, and then compare the fossil-free index with the standard index. When Bloomberg did this for the S&P 500 for the past decade, it found that the fossil-free index ‘performed on par’ with the standard index. Bloomberg encourages investors to look at divestment as ‘an opportunity to create new investment opportunities, and to convince holders of trillions of dollars of capital that alternatives to fossil fuels are equally worthy investments.’”

(The entire position paper can be read at https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ubcc350/pages/43/attachments/original/1414421298/UBC_Fossil_Fuel_Divestment_-_Responsible_Investment_Proposal_October_27_2014.pdf?1414421298)

If UBC does divest, it will join a growing number of organizations that include 15 universities (Stanford, the University of Glasgow and the Australian National University in Canberra among them), 32 cities and counties (including San Francisco and Seattle) and over four dozen religious institutions. It also includes the $860-million philanthropic Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the wealth of which came from Standard Oil.

In all, according to a September 2014 article in the New York Times, some 180 wealthy people, institutions and philanthropies so far have divested themselves of $50 billion worth of fossil fuel assets.

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